Ecoinformatics, field work and molecular methods

Predicting when and where crop pests are likely to outbreak is essential for reducing pesticide application rates. One thing we know is that pest populations are stochastic (they vary a lot in ways that are hard to predict). Ecologists have been calling for more and more data to try and understand this variation. Pest control advisors and agricultural extension advisors often scout agricultural fields multiple times per year looking for specific pests that are of concern to farmers. These monitoring efforts are used to help farmers make within-year management decisions, but they can also be used to help researchers understand variability across time and space. I use this “big-ish data” to understand variation in insect pest phenology and population patterns in complex agroecosystems.

Insects exist in communities, and how those communities interact across trophic levels affects out expectations for abundance patterns of the predator and prey community. One goal when we ask farmers to decrease pesticide spraying is to increase the beneficial predator community. Often times historic monitoring efforts are only documenting the presence and abundance of pest insects. I leverage field work on commercial farms to monitor the effects of farm management choices (e.g. pesticide use, tillage, cropping frequency, organic) on the entire insect community including both herbivorous pest insects (prey) and their predators (beneficial insects). I use transects and different trapping methods to capture variation in the field that I can then bring back to the lab to identify relevant species and quantify differences between sites.

Sometimes we know which predators are eating which prey species, this is especially true for specialist predators.  More often in the field there are many generalist predators and we only have a vague idea what they eat. I use molecular methods to identify the prey items present in the stomach contents of generalist predators in agricultural systems. In this way we can quantify which species are being eaten but also if predator diet is affected by farm management.